ABSTRACT
Cultural representations of idiocy in the 1960s and the early 1970s were fairly rare in Europe and America, a fact that can largely be explained by the widespread interest in the creative potential of madness in literary and intellectual circles. Rather than madness being purely a clinical condition that in its extreme forms should be treated in secure units or total institutions, as the poets Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath explored madness can sometimes take the form of personal expression as a defence against intrusive and debilitating social pressures.1 The vogue for anti-psychiatry in America from the mid-to late 1960s (and to a lesser extent in Britain and Holland), championed by R. D. Laing in The Divided Self (1960) and Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness (1962), treated clinical psychosis as a myth invented as a means to control deviance, anti-social behaviour and delinquency, especially in the young. Perhaps because idiocy has rarely been seen as potentially dangerous or as a direct threat to social values, it was overlooked in the 1960s and 1970s for more exuberant forms of psychic disturbance. Laing’s work championed existential rebellion against passive conformity and he combatted ‘the fibrillating heartland of senescent capitalism’ that he believed was eroding the individual’s inner life.2 His emphasis on the transcendent potential of human experience reflected the counter-cultural ideals of the 1960s and the hostility to the normative demands of scientific, medical, military and religious institutions. For example, in The Politics of Experience (1967) Laing claims:
Here, madness is either the negative product of institutional regulations that
brand the individual, or a personal reaction to the pressures of social conformity and to normative ‘labels’ like schizophrenia.4
